thrive on that which groweth out of the tenants thereof: - all these

Blacknesses are lesser than HE WHO guardeth the Gateway: HE WHO will guide

the rash one beyond all the worlds into the Abyss of unnamable devourers.

For He is 'UMR AT-TAWIL, the Most Ancient One, which the scribe rendereth

as THE PROLONGED OF LIFE."

Memory and imagination shaped dim half-pictures with uncertain outlines

amidst the seething chaos, but Carter knew that they were of memory and

imagination only. Yet he felt that it was not chance which built these

things in his consciousness, but rather some vast reality, ineffable and

undimensioned, which surrounded him and strove to translate itself into

the only symbols he was capable of grasping. For no mind of Earth may

grasp the extensions of shape which interweave in the oblique gulfs

outside time and the dimensions we know.

There floated before Carter a cloudy pageantry of shapes and scenes which

he somehow linked with Earth's primal, eon-forgotten past. Monstrous

living things moved deliberately through vistas of fantastic handiwork

that no sane dream ever held, and landscapes bore incredible vegetation

and cliffs and mountains and masonry of no human pattern. There were

cities under the sea, and denizens thereof; and towers in great deserts

where globes and cylinders and nameless winged entities shot off into

space, or hurtled down out of space. All this Carter grasped, though the

images bore no fixed relation to one another or to him. He himself had no

stable form or position, but only such shifting hints of form and position